Are you wondering why 835,000 tweets have little impact on a prime minister’s job? That’s how many tweets had been posted as of 4 December – two weeks since the #CameronMustGo campaign began on 22 November, attempting to highlight government failings. Twitter says the hashtag has trended in 28 locations worldwide, with the largest volume of tweets coming from its users in the UK, US and Canada.
And that’s exactly the point. Twitter is global. As is this trend. Just shy of a million tweets around the world is not the same as a million UK voters. It’s likely involving less than 1% of the UK population. On its own and without a platform based on ideas, this hashtag won’t change a thing – and it certainly won’t change the world. 11 years ago without a tweet in sight, about two million UK citizens marched against the war in Iraq. Now that’s a powerful movement.
An analysis of UK Twitter trends during the afternoon of 4 December found #CameronMustGo to be trending in London, Newcastle, Plymouth, Portsmouth, Brighton and Derby. But perhaps more revealing was that it was nowhere to be seen in Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Edinburgh, Belfast or Bristol. Why?
#CameronMustGo’s discourse adds nothing to most people’s lives. It fails to give them hope in something. It doesn’t spur them on to campaign for a rival political party or to vote for the first time. People in those big cities were much more interested in using Twitter to discuss The Apprentice, their local football club, James Bond and Christmas than throwing out the prime minister.
This trend tells us that there are a few hundred thousand Twitter users in the UK who really dislike Cameron and the coalition government’s policies and they are prepared to spend quite some time broadcasting their view. Notice that the Labour party has rightly failed to latch on to the hashtag. Believe me, if Ed Miliband saw #CameronMustGo as a game changer – as the Democrats did with Shepard Fairey’s Hope poster – he would have his MPs and prospective parliamentary candidates using it every day.
Despite my view of the #CameronMustGo campaign, I do strongly believe that social media has a measurable impact on brand reputation. Social media allows customers to be heard, MPs to listen to the views of their constituents and charities to cleverly use their main support base as a platform to achieve reach into the millions and find new audiences.
Individuals and organisations are fusing their social media campaigns with online petition sites such as Change.org and traditional media to achieve their goals. Campaigns have succeeded in nudging a minister to take action on female genital mutilation (FGM) and have defied the trolls to secure female representation on bank notes. Note that each of these campaigns had well thought-through messages and clear routes for people to join and take action.
As we move towards the next general election, political parties are thinking seriously about digital campaigning. Labour and the Conservatives now have expert teams for whom content marketing and social media are their default tools. The Liberal Democrats have gone as far as adopting an off-the-shelf digital platform favoured by American political campaigns. And Labour’s website uses similar technologies – and has the claim to fame of being designed and built by the team that put together Obama’s fundraising platform in 2007-08. Both websites put the citizen at the centre of a full campaign and fundraising ecosystem and focus on hyper-local, niche issues and small, positive steps that people want to engage with which help to hook them into the parties’ support bases. Social media is a big part of the capture process. I predict that 2015 will see more commercial brands and corporates catch up with the tools and tactics employed by charities and political parties; and social media will be an important, well-integrated element of their communications campaigns. Social media alone will not be their only focus, nor should it be if they want to succeed.
Chris Woods is head of digital at Hanover Communications
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